A Word on Colic: Part II

Sorry for the delay, folks. Busy time of year (not just the holidays...exams are upon us! I've yet to pull a real all-nighter this semester, but it's looking like it'll happen this week.)

Now, where were we...ah, yes:

So Your Horse Colicked...

It's a scary thing, to see your animal in such pain and misery. However, once you and your vet have brought your horse through a colic episode (assuming surgery or serious medical intervention wasn't needed), it's time to start the real work: figuring out what caused it. Colic doesn't just happen: it's like a warning light on your car's dash. It tells you there's a bigger problem that you need to be attending to. Unfortunately for us, parts of our horse don't like up indicating the problem area. Bummer, but there are ways to find these things out. It can take some sleuthing, and you probably want to have your vet on board (I had a nice little conference call with mine one afternoon to troubleshoot) to give suggestions.

A lot of this is going to depend on your horse and how he or she has been cared for. You know them best, so use this to your advantage before opting for any major. I'm going to take you through my process for Stella, the exact way we figured out what her colic was caused by.

Create A Horsey Questionnaire

Your job is to come up with a list of questions. You don't need answers yet, just get the questions going first. I actually did this when Stella was having her repetitive colic episodes, and believe me it worked WONDERS for helping me get on the right track.

Questions I included on my list:

• When was the last time my horse was dewormed? Have I been good about routinely deworming her, and for how long?
• Was this one of a series of colics, or was this totally random?
• Was my horse significantly stressed at any point today from exercise, fear, being attacked/chased by another horse, a medical procedure, etc?
• (For mares) Is my horse pregnant/did she just have a foal?
• (For mares) Is my horse in heat, or did she just come out of heat?
• Has my horse been heat stressed in the last 24 hours?
• Has my horse been stressed by cold in the last 24 hours?
• Was my horse denied access to food or water for any lengthy period of time?
• Did my horse have any medical work done in the last 24-48 hours?
• Did my horse travel in the last 24-48 hours?
• Does my horse receive a large grain ration? How is this ration divided up (2 feedings, 3, etc)?
• Does my horse have access to roughage 24/7? If not, how often do they?
• Does my horse have a tense, high-strung nature?
• What symptoms does (or did) my horse present with?
• (If reoccuring) Are there any conditions that are consistent during the colic episodes?
• What are your horse's living conditions (stalled most of the time, some turnout, turnout 24/7)?
  

Many of these you can knock right off your list. I knew Stella wasn't pregnant nor had she given birth, but I wanted to include them anyway to be completely thorough and eliminate all possibilities.

Here's what I ended up with: Stella's colics were reoccuring, not singular events. There was no singular condition that was consistent: she'd colicked in the afternoon, late morning, evening, winter, summer, fall, spring, after being clipped, after being out at pasture, after being ridden, after doing nothing. She always presented with the same symptoms: a symphony of gut sounds, a pattern of lying down then getting up, circling, lethargy, refusal of food/water and lots of gas/manure passing. She responded quickly to Banamine each time. She was on a minimal grain ration and had some sort of roughage 16+ hours per day. She was consistently dewormed and had been since I bought her in 2009.

Based on her symptoms, Dr. B suggested we start with the simplest explanation: parasites. She's been consistently dewormed since I'd purchased her but that didn't guarantee she didn't have some sort of parasite load, especially given her care history was questionable when she was young and horses under 2 are among the most susceptible to parasite infestation.

COURSE #1: Dose her over a period of 5 days with anthelmitics in the form of a PowerPac (you don't have to use PowerPac specifically, I think there are a couple purging systems out there). It was the cheapest route, about 50 dollars or so, and it wouldn't hurt her even if it didn't cure her. I choose to do this directly instead of sending in a fecal sample to do an egg count on, since it was faster and would cost about the same.

Note: hopefully you have a good vet who doesn't want to suck money from you. Dr. B is great: we are on the same page in that with things like these, sometimes the most efficient and least-costly way to go is to just treat. If the treatment won't hurt the horse if it turns out to not have the condition you treated for, it makes more sense money wise to treat than to test THEN treat.

VERDICT: failed. She colicked a week after finishing the Powerpac.

The next course of action was a call to Dr. B. We discussed the possibility of it being related to heat cycles, protein levels in her feed, all sorts of weird, random things. Stuff that has nothing to do with colic and hasn't even been documented to have any relation to colic. We discussed ulcers, but given she wasn't highly stressed and was fairly young and not in competition, we tabled that idea. We settled on a gas issue, possibly caused by a digestive inefficiency or poor digestive conformation (it can happen: a horse with a poorly conformed gut can actually develop pockets of gas that don't move easily on their own, causing colic).

COURSE #2: A feed-through supplement called Succeed, which is basically like a gut-rehab program. It reconditions the gut to work properly from front to back, increases digestive efficiency, helps balance the levels of good "gut bugs", and ultimately gets everything working honky-dory. Some horses need to be on it for life. Some just need it long enough to help boost their system, at which point the body takes over. We planned a 30 day trial to test our theory: she would be fed Succeed 2x a day for a week and then lowered to 1x a day for the remainder of the 30 days. We would re-evaluate at the end of the period.

VERDICT: failed. She didn't colic within the first 15 days or so, which made it look promising. She did towards the end, though less severely, but they didn't go away all together. We considered this a sign that something else was awry, and took her off the Succeed.

Now we were down to a more serious issue. There are some pretty crazy things out there that can cause colic: believe me, I looked up every one of them, and there were nights when I lay in bed wondering what mysterious and awful condition my mare had contracted. Little did I know the answer was fairly simple, fairly obvious and very common.

And the winner is:

Ulcers.

Yes, somehow my barely 4 year old mare had a raging case of ulcers. How it happened, why it happened, I'll likely never know. Studies have shown that upwards of 60% of horses PERIOD (meaning this ranges from your oldtimer in the backyard up to Olympic level dressage horses, racers and big time cutters and eventers) have ulceration of the stomach to some degree.

Most of us think of ulcers as something that only happens to show horses, racehorses, horses who have a propensity for high energy and equally high nerves, and those cranky horses you see in almost every barn who get fed buckets of grain and never leave their stalls. We think, the horse has to be seriously stressed for ulcers to form! Not so, as I found out.

Stella had been worked 4-5 days a week at a very low level (groundwork, long lining, lunging, no riding) for 90% of the time she had been colicking. She did not travel hardly ever. She did not show. She was turned out either alone or with Ernie. Her diet was consistent, and included minimal grain (less than a pound a day) and lots of hay/pasture. She was constantly moving. She was a little nervous at times but she was also green and in training, didn't have a lot of mileage and was slowly gaining confidence. Not exactly a prime candidate for ulcers, but she had them, and based on the frequency of the colics, they were bad.

I had the option of having her scoped, but that meant fasting her for 12 hours, depriving her of water for 6, then loading her in a trailer and driving her 90 minutes north to a clinic she'd never been to, and it would all cost about as much as the treatment would anyway. So I signed away about a grand and put her on a 30 day regimen of Gastroguard, administered in paste form daily. This was all about 3 months ago, and she hasn't colicked or even looked uncomfortable since, nor did she during the 30 day trial.

I am lucky that the solution was simple (though expensive, but hey, horses are cheap to begin with). Had I waited or fiddled with other treatments, her condition could have gotten worse.

Now, I would have NEVER thought my horse had ulcers. We all want to think we're the perfect horse owners, and that we take the best care of our horses. The truth is, you can do everything under the sun and still wind up with illness. It happens. Some horses are more prone to ulcers than others. I will have to watch Stella in the future, and if she starts having mild colics again, she'll go through another round of ulcer medication. But don't despair, there are plenty of things you can do to prevent ulcers and colic in general. May I present The Chronicles of Ernest Colic Prevention Cheatsheet:

1. Do your homework, learn about the equine gut. There are a million and one texts out there, many for less than 20 bucks, that you can purchase. Look over a few diagrams, read about about what happens, from entrance to exit. Honestly, it's the best way to appreciate the most important part of your horse. When you feed your horse, you aren't feeding your horse, you're feeding his gut. What makes your horse happy may not make his gut happy (i.e., your horse does not always think about food with his gut in mind...therefore, you have to)
2. Cut the grain. Seriously, in 99% of horses it isn't necessary; the average horse doesn't need grain. Grains should be considered a supplement, not a feed source. Just like not every horse needs a coat, joint or hoof supplement, not every horse needs grain. With that in mind, don't just throw a few flakes of hay out per day and call it good. A ration balancer (yes, I used the R word again) is a fantastic thing. It gives your horse everything he needs without adding extra calories and starches...excess starches in a horse's diet can wreak HAVOC on his system, causing digestive, hoof and metabolic upset and making him more prone to, you guessed it, ulcers. Your horse's gut just isn't set up to handle grain. If you must feed it, feed small amounts and break it up into multiple feedings, as many as you can manage.
3. Don't underestimate the value of a good probiotic or prebiotic. They are indispensable in giving your horse the little boost he may need. Even a seemingly healthy horse can benefit from adding one: domestication is the worst thing that ever happened to a horse's digestive system. No horse living in domestication has a gut that operates in the same way it would in the wild (not unless you own 1000's of acres and allow your horse's to roam freely year-round with no additional care on wild grasses and shrubs), so this little additive can boost even a healthy horse tremendously.
4. With that said, resist the urge to add "extra stuff". Minimize the extras you put in your horse's diet. This includes supplements: if your horse doesn't need it, don't give it to him. Good grooming, exercise and proper diet minimize 99% of the problems your horse could have, so sometime this week take a detailed look at what your horse gets and decide if he really needs it. It could save you money, and it's better for your horse.
5. Spend money now to save money later. We all know there are things we'd love to be able to do for our horses but can't afford. So, spend the money where it counts now. Don't ignore routine vet check-ups, vaccinations, coggins, dental work, chiropractic, etc. A happy horse is not a sick horse. Spending the money on these things now will limit the risk that something major goes wrong in the future: if something is wrong with your horse, don't assume it'll get better on it's own. Call the vet, be safe, and prevent anything from worsening and blowing up.
6. Go for quality. Feed the best forage you can afford, and make sure your boarding facility has health in mind, not cutting costs. Cheap hay may be nice on your wallet in the short term, but in the long term it doesn't nothing to help you or your horse. Spend the extra 50 cents a bale now. Mold, dust and sickness are not worth saving a few bucks over.
7. Make changes slowly. Feed changes have been proven to cause colic, especially when made too rapidly. Allow for at LEAST 7 days to make a changeover to a different grain, hay, or anything else that goes in your horse's mouth.

I'm sure many of you have other things you'd do, and if they work, keep on going! Horse care is not a one size fits all kind of thing. Horses are like people: they're all unique, and in our care, they all need slightly different things to perform up to our standards. But take care of your friend, for his sake. :) You'll get many more happy years out of him this way.